A blog about whatever comes to my mind, regurgitating the wisdom of others as I come across it. Thoughts about faith, family, and life in general. I don’t know what I think until I write it down…so here it is.

Tag: Galatians

I’ve been watching Trollhunters, a Netflix original series, with my kids lately. We’ve all been enjoying it. It’s well-produced, full of thrilling action scenes that bounce around an epic mythology and a diverse array of characters.

If you’re a fan of the vision of Guillermo del Toro, as exemplified in movies like Hellboy and Pan’s Labryinth, you’re in for a treat. Trollhunters is overflowing with the same colorful, zany design. (And also, Ron Perlman). As such, it can be a bit dark and scary, but this makes it more thrilling when the darkness is chased away.

While I can’t give it an unqualified thumbs up as appropriate for all kids, there is one lesson it bestowed that bears repeating, one that we would all do well to take to heart.

One of the main characters, a big troll named (I kid you not) AAARRRGGHH!!!, is a self-avowed pacifist, trying to atone for his violent past. His principles are tested and reiterated at several points throughout the show. About halfway through the series, however, he violates his pacifism to save the life of Toby, his human friend. He deals a killing blow to a dangerous killer troll.

Toby looks in shock at his friend. “AAARRRGGHH!!! Your oath!”

And AAARRRGGHH!!! says, “Your life more important.”

This highlights a profound truth. It is found everywhere in Scripture. Some principles are greater than others. Jesus says that there are two commandments that are the greatest. Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. When he says these are greater than the others, I take it to mean that they are greater than the others.

And the character of AAARRRGGHH!!! understands the “love your neighbor” part more than most.

If we don’t put “love your neighbor” in its proper place, then we descend into self-righteousness, similar to the Pharisees. They would tithe from their spice rack, and declare that all they had was to be given God…and then neglect their own mothers. It sure looked and sounded great.

If my family is assaulted, I can sound high and mighty, and act superior by citing verses like “turn the other cheek” or “love your enemies,” and use them as a cover for cowardice while sounding extra holy and pious. If I fail to do something, what I’m really doing is hating my family. Hating the neighbors God has put directly under my charge.

This is one reason why the Bible has such a nuanced view of deception. The Hebrew midwives, when commanded to kill all the baby boys, lied to Pharaoh. To be honest in that situation would have been hating their neighbors. And God blesses them for their dishonesty.

Our principles are just something else we can end up boasting in, puffing ourselves up. But we should be careful to boast only in one thing.

“But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” Galatians 6:14

We are called to lay down our own lives. But we don’t get to choose to lay down the lives of others. Those are the very lives we should be cherishing more than our own.

This can play out in many different ways in our modern world as well. We are susceptible to the language and rhetoric of compassion, all the while harboring a hatred and contempt for our neighbors. If you have offered support for taking care of the poor or taking in refugees…and then “volunteer” someone else’s time, resources, and/or money, you are guilty of this.

Likewise, a friend should not seek to hurt another friend. But in some cases, the loving thing to do is to deliver a properly timed wound. “Niceness” isn’t necessarily a Christian virtue, and coddling can be just as hateful as a knife in the back.

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.” Proverbs 27:6

“On these hang all of the Law and the Prophets.” Your neighbors life is more important than the letter of the law.

“For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” 2 Corinthians 3:6

Discerning the correct path in a given situation isn’t always easy. Oftentimes, it requires a lifetime of practice (Hebrews 5:14), of honed wisdom. If it requires a quick decision, it becomes even harder.

But maybe AAARRRGGHH!!! the troll can can give us some valuable insight.

How do we engrain a love of our neighbors so that it becomes habit, engraved on our hearts and minds?

Every sin is against a holy God, and against Him only do we sin (Psalm 51:4). This, with the fact that we are all guilty and deserve death (Romans 6:23), can sometimes tempt us to flatten all offenses and treat them all as equal. After all, James 2:10-11 says that if you fail to keep the law in one point, you are accountable to the whole law.

Jesus and the Pharisees

One of the warnings given against any kind of ranking is that is the temptation of pride, to act like the Pharisee who looks over at the sinner, and thanks God that he is not like him (Luke 18:9-14). While the sin and temptation to act like a Pharisee is perennial, we often are blind to what the sins of the Pharisees actually were, even though Jesus spells it out quite clearly for us time and again. We are never more like Jesus’s disciples than when we are like this: befuddled, confused, and always missing the point.

What were Jesus’s actual criticisms of the Pharisees?

Matthew 23: 23 – 24

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

There are weightier matters of the law. And some things are gnats while some are camels.

In the Sermon on the Mount, which is partly a response to the “rightouesness” of the Pharisees, Jesus says in Matthew 7:3-5:

Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. (ESV)

Some matters are a speck, and some are a log. The fact that they both impair eyesight does not mean they are equal.

And lest we forget, Jesus also explicitly says that there are some commandments that are greater than others.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Matt. 22:37-39 ESV)

If certain commandments are more important, it makes sense that breaking those commandments would be a more serious matter.

Of course, this is not to ignore the other commandments. But some are foundational, and some are not. Some commandments are downstream from other commandments, caught up by the momentum of the current.

Finally, let’s not forget the the true unpardonable sin, blaspheming against the Holy Spirit (Mark 3:28-29). If we can’t say that this sin is worse than others, does the Christian have any basis of making any value judgments at all? Do words mean anything?

So what was one glaring part of the Pharisees’ problem? Not that they weighted sins differently, but the fact that they weighted sins improperly.

Every sin is against a holy God. But has that same God made known that some are more despicable than others? Should we, perhaps, pay attention? The entire law is filled with sins that are given different penalties. Read Ezekiel 8. Some things are more detestable to God than others.

And then, mercy gets bumped further up in the line, for God desires mercy, and not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6). That is an astounding statement, because sacrifice is the very thing that makes it tolerable for God to dwell near his people.

Blood guilt was (and still is) a very real thing, but stipulations were made to take into account motive. Was it an accident or premeditated (Deut 19:4)? That state of heart made a difference in the severity.

And in the New Testament…Continued

Why did Jesus say it would be worse for Sodom than a town that denied hospitality to his disciples? The sins of Sodom were great, but they didn’t seem to light a candle to some of the sins of the generation Jesus preached to.

And what about those who turned Jesus over to be crucified?

Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin. (John 19:11 ESV)

When we get to Paul, we see the same thing. Paul’s list of qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy assumes that some sins will disqualify someone from being an elder.

Then there is the curious statement in 1 Cor. 6:18:

Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.

Sexual sin is a serious matter. Not only is it a sin against the body committing it, its so bad that God uses the sin itself as a judgement against the wicked (Romans 1). In many ways, it is its own punishment.

This even applies to doctrine itself. Of first importance…(1 Cor 15:3-5). God doesn’t hold to irreducible materialism, and neither should you. Some things are the foundation of the house, and some things are just the window trimmings. If we take pride in assuming they are of the same importance, people will rightly give us funny looks when we try to construct an addition to the house and start with laying down the curtains.

Why We Cringe

Why do we react against the simple truth that not all sins are equal? There are three main reasons.

We all have pet issues, things that we like to focus on to help create our own illusion that we are more righteous than someone else or some other group. If all sins are equal, that helps us pretend that the faith itself is at stake! If all commandments and sins were NOT equal, we would be forced to give our fellow brothers some slack when they did not agree with us on our favorite issue, and therefore realize our personal passion isn’t the most important thing ever since the Resurrection. It slows us down from devouring one another (Gal 5:15).

Weighting sins and commandments properly is a powerful corrective against sectarianism. If you must love God and love your neighbor above all else, then you must love God and love your neighbor above all else. Looking over at the adulterer, and feeling smug because you never cheated on your wife, is completely foreign to the two greatest commandments. Looking over the guy drinking a beer, and congratulating yourself on your teetotalism, is actually hating your neighbor.

So we, like the Pharisees, ask “Who is our neighbor?”, desperately hoping Jesus doesn’t point over there and say…that guy.

Most of the time, these are traditions that have been elevated, but this even applies for those matters that are not traditions. And this where wisdom must come in. Real life is messy, and it cannot be navigated properly with a simple pietism. This leads to our next point…

2. The desire for simple, immature, and straightforward pietism.

One reason that men desire to collapse everything into an indistinguishable glob of goo, including the weight of certain sins, it makes things easier to discern. If everything is black and white, we can just descend into a simplistic form of pietism that requires minimal wisdom. We don’t want to grow up. We don’t want to eat solid food. We don’t want to the constant practice it requires (Heb. 5:14). At least, until the real world slaps us in the face, and then it all collapses. When that happens, we just thank God we’re not like those other people over there, and congratulate ourselves for not compromising and keeping ourselves pure.

Take the cliched scenario of Nazis looking for Jews. If you were hiding Jews in your basement, and the Nazis came knocking, it will not do to wring your hands over lying, or stand tall in your obedience of Romans 13. If you do either, you are not being righteous. You are being a coward. The command for mercy trumps many things. You could even say it is a weightier matter of the law.

3. The most important commandments are really, really hard to obey.

Other people are annoying. I mean, they’re other people after all. Sometimes they smell funny.

Idols also have much too easy of a time settling down in our hearts, and finding a cozy spot on the couch. And then we offer them some iced tea before kissing their feet.

If we are honest, we must admit that we fail in the greatest commandments every single day. We are guilty. But if all sins are equal, perhaps we can take some misplaced solace in the fact that we have succeeded in something monumental.” I haven’t committed adultery and I don’t steal. I must be doing pretty good.” When we try and flatten all sins, we imagine them as deep as the kiddie pool, below our knees. If we don’t commit some, we can high-step it out of this muck.

In reality, the muck is constantly over our heads, and we are drowning. If we miss out on the greatest commandments, the others do not matter. And that is uncomfortable.

We are not in need of weeding our garden. We are in need of a strip-mining crew to lay it bare, haul in new soil, and reseed the cursed ground. Only once we treat the greatest commandments as the greatest commandments, does weeding the garden even make any sense. Only when we have this perspective does tithing out of the spice rack have any value.

And to which of the angels has he ever said, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet”? Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?

Chapter one is a build up to one of the author’s many “therefores,” and the end, just quoted, is a stout one. The kind that makes you want to sit down if you are standing. Let’s follow the logic:

Jesus has become superior to angels (v.4)

Why and how? Jesus is the Son, and no angel has been called that (v.5)

Angels are to worship the Son, and are now servants of wind and fire (v.6,7)

Jesus’s throne is forever. Not only that, but He has laid the foundation of the earth itself (v.8-12)

Jesus sits at God’s right hand, and no angel has been invited to do that (v.13)

Angels are to minister to those who will inherit (v.14)

THEREFORE (going into chapter 2):

We must pay all the more attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away, because what we have heard has come from the Son. The Son! And if the message declared by angels was reliable, how much greater the Son’s word? If we neglect His word, what else is there? He is above every name. There is no testimony that could have more authority or weight.

So that’s the general flow. And while the first THEREFORE could be studied extensively, I want to focus on the final reasoning leading up to it, the final guidepost before the author arrives at his point. His whole argument is telling us what the new hierarchy of creation is, ending by telling us that angels now serve us.

A man now sits on a throne in heaven, ruling with all authority. Even over the angels. This inverts what was before, the old order of creation. And because we are united with the Son and King through baptism and by the Spirit, we are part of his body.

We who were made a little lower than the angels are now above the angels, thanks to the saving work of Christ. This is even corroborated by 1 Cor 6:3a.

Do you not know that we are to judge angels?

Chew on that. We have angels ministering on our behalf, and why? Because we are now adopted into the royal household, and have the full rights of sonship, which includes use of the household servants, who used to be over us as guardians and managers (Gal. 4:1-3). But then Galatians 4:7:

So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

C.S. Lewis, in his Space Trilogy, hints that this is one of the main reasons that Satan rebelled: jealousy over the authority that mankind would eventually wield over him and his like. And I think he has a point.

Satan, an angel, had some semblance of authority over mankind, but he knew that it was not to be forever. Eventually, man would mature and come fully into his kingdom. So while he still had authority, he tempted Adam to grasp for his kingdom early, the same temptation he would eventually try on the last Adam (Matt. 4:8-9).

Satan, one of the guardians or managers set to watch over us, didn’t want us to grow up into our inheritance. So he ensured we would not…at least not without drastic measures that he couldn’t foresee.

Next, I’ll delve a little into the significance of the angels being wind and fire, as that seems to be a hinge of the structure listed above.

It is appropriate that Abraham, the father of our faith, should be listed in Hebrews 11 not just once, but twice. The writer gives more words only to Moses. The first time deals with Abraham’s call to leave his father’s house.

By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. (Heb 11:8-10)

Abraham was a sojourner. A pilgrim. More than that, he was a sojourner in a land that God promised him, and since God promised him, he knew that, in a sense, it belonged to him already. God blessed him so much that the Hittites called him a mighty prince (Gen. 23:5), powerful rulers sought to make alliances with him and his offspring (Gen 21:22,23), and he defeats an alliance of five kings with only 318 men (Gen 14:15). Not bad for a sojourner.

Not bad, at least, when compared with the kind of sojourner we normally assume the New Testament writers are talking about, especially when referring to Christians. Peter tells us to “pass the time of your sojourning here” (1 Peter 1:17) and then again saying “I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul” (1 Peter 2:11).

A whole tradition has grown from the idea of being a pilgrim or alien of the world, sharpened by Paul’s language of citizenship, and colored with Greek and gnostic philosophy in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries. It can be summed up nicely in the song “This World is Not My Home.”

This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through.

In essence, our true home is in the heavenly realm, and someday, we will finally leave this wicked, corrupt world and be able to return home. Our pilgrimage will be over. The rest of the world can literally go to Hell.

But is this the picture we get? Is this really what being a pilgrim in the world means?

Was Abraham, the first sojourner of faith and the context for the New Testament use of these terms, just a passing through the promised land?

To ask the question is to answer it. Abraham even performs a symbolic act of staking his claim in the land of Canaan. He buys a field from one of the Hittites to bury Sarah, and then his own bones are laid to rest in the same tomb. The conquest didn’t start with Joshua. It started with Abraham after the death of his wife.

Abraham is a pilgrim in the promised land, which means he is called a pilgrim in his own land. And he knows it.

How does this relate to the children of the promise today?

First, we must realize that just as Abraham buying a plot of land was a symbolic act of conquest, the later conquest of the promised land by the Israelites was also a symbolic act of something greater.

For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. (Rom. 4:13)

Abraham was not just promised Canaan. He was promised that all of the nations through him would be blessed, and according to Paul, this means that he would inherit the world.

And we are inheritors of the same promise.

And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. (Gal 3:29)

Christ himself says that the meek will inherit the earth. How much time have we spent explaining away the plain sense of this beatitude, when the plain sense fits so well with the promise of Abraham?

Christ has risen. All authority has been given to him in heaven and on earth (Matt. 28:18). The new order has been established, God has named his king, and his king will rule at his right hand until all of his enemies bow in homage (Psalm 110:1). And what is the domain of the king?

Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. (Psalm 2:8)

Through Christ, the promise of Abraham will come to fruition. We are pilgrims now in the promised land, heirs of the promise. But that means we are the advance guard, building wells and establishing alters like Abraham our father, knowing that we wander in our inheritance. For he “hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:10). Creation itself longs for the final victory.

For the creation waits with eager longing forthe revealing of the sons of God. For the creationwas subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know thatthe whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. (Rom. 8:21-22, ESV)

As someone once said, the world is not God’s Vietnam. He is not scrambling to bring the troops home from a theater of war that is crumbling, in some kind of strategic retreat.

Pilgrimages of the people of God don’t end with a whimper and a sigh. They don’t end with a rescue.

They end in conquest. They end in victory.

“That God may be all in all.” Amen.

What about you? Have you viewed the call to be a sojourner in this world as a call to simply “hold down the fort?” Do you believe the promises that “the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world”(1 Jn. 4:14)?